This invention relates to electronic editing and more particularly to editing of integrated color images and related text material of a document over telephone lines connecting a customer with a copy center.
Production of high quality color brochures and other color documents containing text material requires the ability to edit the text material and then integrate it with color images followed by printing of the integrated document without loss of color resolution. Printers capable of producing high quality color printed images are expensive and are usually not affordable by individuals and small businesses who typically rely on printers at a copy center for their printing needs.
By sharing an expensive, high quality color laser copier among many personal computer users, the cost to produce high quality color printouts can be lowered to levels affordable by most individuals and small businesses.
Sharing a color printer can be accomplished by a user visiting a print center with text material and color images which then may be scanned at the print center for color laser printing purposes. Alternatively the color copier or printer may be accessed remotely.
Remote access to the color laser copier or printer can be accomplished by telephone but this can result in substantial transmission costs since transmitting uncompressed color images over telephone lines requires sending millions of bytes of image data over lines having limited transmission capacity. Typically, a color image can require several million bytes of pixel information to accurately represent the image. Commercial phone lines can transmit information at data rates up to a few thousand bytes per second by means of conventional MODEM (modulator demodulator) technology. Hence, a color image containing ten million bytes of pixel information will require ten thousand seconds if a 9600 band MODEM is utilized. This results in almost three hours of transmission time per image. This invention provides the means of reducing their transmission time by a factor of one hundred by means of data compression.
In the present invention, the text of a document may be edited and moved on its sheet or sheets of paper by telephone transmission without the need of color image transmission and when the document is fixed it may be printed by a color laser copier or printer with high resolution.
Two means for reducing printing and transmission costs by telephone transmission and subsequent printing of the document at the local print center comprise:
1. Compressing the color image prior to telephone transmission followed by decompression of the image at the shared printer; and
2. Physically transferring color images to the copy center (hand carry, mail, etc.) for scanning followed by telephone transmission of text material to be integrated with the scanned color image at the copy center.
The advantage of the first solution is that the integration of text material and color image can be done completely at the user's location without requiring the additional step of physically transferring a separate color image to the copy center. The disadvantage of this approach is that data compression at levels sufficient to significantly reduce transmission time may introduce distortion in the color image thereby reducing the quality of the printed output.
The advantages of the second solution, i.e., the physical transfer of the full color image to the print center uncompressed or partially compressed is that the resulting document incorporating both text material and color images has maximum fidelity since distortion introduced by data compression can be minimized or totally eliminated. The disadvantage of this solution is that the integration of the text material and the color images would normally be extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain since the integration process is performed by the user on his personal computer which is remote from the copy center.
A solution which produces the lowest cost, highest quality integration of text material and color image, while preserving user convenience inherent in remote text editing, is the technology of electronic mirror editing disclosed and claimed herein.